Transistor Rhythm

50 Weapons; 2012

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Addison Groove's "Footcrab" was a flashpoint for footwork and juke music in 2010, providing UK audiences an anthem to rally around. The track was a special kind of stoopid, a pure pastiche whose innovation-- slowing footwork's daft repetitions to UK bass speeds-- was inevitable and whose only sliver of wit came via its childlike abstraction of Chicago's crude mantras. It was so blindingly obvious and addictive that there frankly wasn't much to be said about it (see number five). In the two years since "Footcrab", peers like Pearson Sound and Sepalcure have found more nuanced applications of the Footwork sound, and Chicago originators like Traxman and DJ Rashad have toured Europe and released artist albums on Planet Mu. Addison Groove had impeccable timing, but the richest applications of the footwork template were coming from elsewhere.

Addison Groove-- né Antony Williams-- wasn't being lapped, though; he was casually refocusing, setting down footwork in favor of its more durable uncle, juke. His early singles in this style faithfully reproduced the rubbery basslines and 808 drum sounds but were somehow too oriented and dialed in. Straight recreations of this music-- which was produced cheaply and quickly-- might still yield fruit, but Williams' singles were long and thin. Count me among the surprised that his debut album, Transistor Rhythm, on Modeselektor's 50 Weapons, is so well thought and accomplished. He's still taking cues from Chicago's South Side veterans, but for the first time it feels like he's building something of his own. The tracks on Transistor Rhythm are coiled and weighty, dense and tough where their predecessors were diffuse and pliable.

Williams accomplishes this by slowing juke's core elements-- hissy rhythms, virulent bass-- to dubstep tempos-- he stays, with exceptions, in a familiar 120-140 bpm pocket here-- and adding snatches of vocals and rave-y synth patches. He spins the mixture like a top, and the result is tight, controlled motion that peters out as your attention begins to wane. During the slightly homogeneous middle third of the record, he rarely misses his mark: "Sooperlooper" capitalizes on a squelchy, pinched synth; "Ass Jazz" features drums that hew tightly to a short, pugnacious bassline. On "Skylight", clipped diva vocals threaten to untether from the rhythm section's wild orbit. When he stretches out on "Incredibly Exhausted Bunny Ears", he visits the spacey synth pads of early 1990s UK acts like Orbital on Chicago's hot circuits.

He's still not clever: Early-album tracks "Bad Things" and "Beeps" feature Spank Rock and aspire to the vulgar repetition of ghetto house. "Fuck you, bitch," over, and over, and over. And there's nothing as sticky as "Footcrab": Join me in not quite remembering the precise turns of "Superlooper" or "Skylight". He never manages a Dance Mania tribute as personal and strange as Nina Kraviz's "Ghetto Kraviz". Transistor Rhythm has been met with mild disappointment by many bass music fans, but I don't hear it. Williams is no longer ahead of the curve, sure, but Transistor Rhythm's finest moments come when he threatens to step away from the curve completely. It is an album of well-portioned, difficult grooves that owe as much to craftsmanship as they do to scholarship, the sound of a chronic disciple slowing learning to make his influences work for him.